All but the Bibliography

Today I have sent off my conclusion, appendices, abstract and title to my supervisor. That means he has everything that is part of my thesis. That means he has been looking at it this weekend to see if it hangs together. Now the re-write has been about working through all the chapters in order so as to create a narrative that holds them together. I could not have told you at the start what the narrative is, but by the end it was there. Indeed it was so clearly there I was able to write the abstract. The abstract is a real challenge as it has to be under 200 words. My thesis is around 80,000. That means the abstract ism 0.25% of the length of the thesis. To condense the thesis down to that length requires real focus on what are the essentials of the research.  So I am pretty confident that I have a decent last draft.

It is not perfect. The major defect at this stage as far as I can see is part of my final chapter is at present in the conclusion. It needs to go into the final chapter and then the conclusion actually needs stuff in it that is a step back. The reason is that I am talking still about what I am finding and not stepping back and trying to spell out what I am contributing to a topic. What I hope I am contributing is a way to start to treat social systems as if they are dynamic particularly congregations. Oh Social Sciences know that the systems are dynamic and that they change with time. Theorists such as Kuhn and Gramsci have done that for the large scale shifts and many people have suggested that small scale also change. However the work when it comes about is mainly static, we are trying to capture what happens at one instance and think that direction does not matter.

My conclusion therefore is we need to deal with direction, it is never enough just to look at where we are, we need to have some idea of where we are going and how we are going to get there. Actually let me reorder those questions, only through knowing how we are moving can we begin to know where we are heading. I have discovered just one process among many that are in action to shape the congregations identity. The process is not determinative, it does not say we will definitely go in a particular direction. Indeed I would argue that eventual destination is unpredictable.  However it does start to look at what is going on and why it is going on.

I wanted to take one of the primroses that are out in the local park but by the time I had the pieces sent to my supervisor it was raining. So I have taken an old daffodil photo I took a couple of years back. Daffodils are not out here yet (unlike crocuses and primroses but their leaves are showing above the ground).